AMD has its chips in every major gaming console this coming generation

[Turtle]

Just thought I'd point this out.

But before you call me an AMD fanboy, I think the video card wars are just stupid, and I loved my TNT2 and GeForce when I had it. But the price was on the ATI/AMD side whenever it came time for me to buy a new card the last few years.

Anyone else interested in the implications of this?

I mean, if you look at gaming today, the consoles of this generation pretty much defined the graphics of this era, including PC graphics. So many games were optimized for a certain type and power of graphics that, in a way, we also had a PC gaming renaissance because the graphics tech was so stable. And now, it's looking that it'll be even more stable.

NVidia has been pushing certain techs like CUDA and PhysX, which are basically proprietary versions of some now open tech like OpenCompute. They've been pushing that hard, but I wonder if AMD's tight control of this console generation means NVidia is going to have to pay even more developers to make use of their technologies.

Now the downside is that AMD has announced they won't be making a new consumer graphics card until later 2013. However, it now looks like all developers will be optimizing for something around the AMD 7XXX and 8XXX lines. NVidia also sounds like it has a beast of a video card, probably making use of a lot of nice new tech that the consoles will also be using.

[CeeKay]

Now the downside is that AMD has announced they won't be making a new consumer graphics card until later 2013.

that's what worries me.  with them having definite sales to MS and Sony for their chips they may be able to afford to get lazy for a bit on the PC side.  I've noticed I tend to go with AMD or nVidia every other PC build, with my oldest rig being nVidia, my newer being ATI/AMD, and my current being nVidia, so AMD was due to go in my next rig this fall/early 2014.

[Canuck]

I mean, if you look at gaming today, the consoles of this generation pretty much defined the graphics of this era, including PC graphics. So many games were optimized for a certain type and power of graphics that, in a way, we also had a PC gaming renaissance because the graphics tech was so stable. And now, it's looking that it'll be even more stable.

This, so much this. I love the fact that my 3 year old laptop (probably older if you start from the time it was released not when I bought it) still plays all the latest releases just fine. If this continues for the next generation I will be very happy. I figure I'll probably buy a new laptop 2 years after the new consoles are released and be good for another 5 years at least.

[Teggy]

So what you're telling me is that console ports are going run like crap on my 660tis.

[Turtle]

Nah, I think Nvidia card's performance will be unaffected for the most part, so long as they implement standards.

However, the proprietary GPU features are going to get much less support because they're not going to be standard in any consoles, or at least implemented via a more standardized way. For example, PhysX is awesome, but future implementation of GPU based physics will likely go through OpenCompute instead of the PhysX API.

[EngineNo9]

I still think you can never go wrong with an Nvidia card.  Their developer support just outshine ATI/AMD all the time and to me that's always worth more than a card that may be theoretically 2% faster in some cases but has crappier drivers.

What I'm more happy about is that the next generation of consoles has basically standard PC parts in them.  No more proprietary CPUs, etc, and that should make cross-platform development significantly easier all around.